They left shortly after Cass woke up the next morning. Cass called it morning, but it was almost noon. Alyx had spent the morning organizing the campground into a long-term encampment, taking stock of what the villagers still had and what they would need to get back on their feet.

New palisades were already being raised around the campground. The villagers would stay here until the town could be rebuilt, an effort Alyx promised the duchy would see completed.

“I would rather they relocate to the capital until real walls can be put up,” Alyx muttered as they galloped away. Cass, Alyx, and Salos were once again sharing a horse. Open fields rippled around them, the smudge of smoke above the burned town disappearing behind them. “But I don’t have time to oversee a caravan like that and they have too many injured to easily move, regardless.”

“You’ve done what you can,” Salos said lazily. “And promised more besides. Was it within your power to promise all you did?”

“The duty of the grand duchess and her soldiers is to protect her subjects,” Alyx said. “Since the Wing has failed them, it is only right we compensate them.”

“How honorable,” Salos muttered.

“If we don’t do this much, how could we claim to be their lords?” Alyx’s hands clenched around the reins. “At the end of the day, it will be up to the grand duchess how much aid that town will get.”

They galloped on, pulling away from the forests and into ever more open land. Ahead, the purple silhouettes of mountains peaked over the horizon, growing taller and taller like pillars of stone. Except they weren’t mountains.

They were floating pillars of stone. All were craggy, white-grey stone, anything soft about them stripped away by the vicious winds that snaked between the pillars. Hardy vines clung to the bare stone, sprawling through hundreds of feet of open air from one pillar to another, hanging low below them, reaching vainly for distant soil.

“What are they?” Cass asked, her eyes never leaving the sky of floating pillars.

“Spires?” Alyx said. “We are at the edge of the Sea of Spires, one of the highest density areas of Spires. Definitely the densest collection of Spires over the Continent.

How did they float? Cass wondered. Perhaps a silly question. The Continent floated too, after all.

“Is it the kind of stone?” Cass muttered.

“What?” Alyx asked.

“The stone; if I chipped off a piece, would it still float?” The answer had to be yes. How else—

“No?” Alyx looked at Cass like she’d just suggested the Earth was flat. “Why would a stone float?”

Cass pointed at the pillars of floating stone. “Are they not made of stone? Do they not float?”

“Sure,” Alyx said slowly. “Spires float, but what does that have to do with stone?”

Cass opened her mouth to argue. But how did one argue with nonsense?

“Close your mouth, you’ll bite your tongue off,” Alyx said.

“Salos, can you explain?” Cass begged.

“Spires float.” Salos shrugged. “The sky is up. The abyss is down.”

***

Cass never got an answer to her question. She was sure there was a reason beyond ‘because they do’, but either neither Alyx nor Salos felt like explaining, or they didn’t know. She filed the question away for later.

Eventually, a tall wall of stone rose from the horizon: the walls of the city. They towered over the landscape, cold and imposing.

They slowed as they approached the gate. A line of carts stood waiting for entrance. The guard at the front admitted them one at a time after checking cargo and papers.

Alyx didn’t wait in line, trotting their horse up to the front. She pulled back and let Telis take the lead.

The butler dismounted and brandished a leather-bound booklet. “This is the Lady Alyx Veldor and her party, returning from the Trial of Uvana Valley.”

The woman at the gate barely looked at the papers Telis handed her. Instead, she watched Alyx, a malicious grin slipping over her lips. “Miss Alyx Veldor, a bit late, aren’t yah?”

“I have my own schedule,” Alyx replied stiffly. “Your concern over my timetables has been noted. Next time I need someone to run an errand for me to save five minutes, I’ll keep you in mind.”

“Cute, Veldor.” The guard scowled. “Still, you’re in luck. The Festival hasn’t started yet.”

Alyx scowled back. “I don’t appreciate the joke.”

“Not joking.” The guard made a show of flipping through the gate papers.

“The duchess wouldn’t have delayed the festival for me. It should have started days ago.”

“32nd (Tooth?) is still out on a mission. Honorably assigned by the duchess herself.” There was a barb to the guard’s tone. One part was the obvious implication about Alyx’s position relative to this other person. But there was also heavy weight on that second word, (tooth?).

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It was said like a name or a title. The system hadn’t flagged names up to this point, even when they weren’t Earth names. So a title then? What kind of title was related to teeth?

Cass turned the word over in her head. The system provided context, wordless images and feelings. Connotation: teeth; the jaws of predators; feral; uncompromising; sharp, tearing things.

The English word ‘Fang’ was perhaps closest, although that referred to only the incisors on a mammal and the teeth that injected venom on a snake, not the entire mouth of teeth like this word seemed to.

There was a click in the back of her head, like a puzzle piece snapping into place. She felt the skill accept the word ‘fang’ as an appropriate translation for the word.

Jothi Language Comprehension increased to level 6.

And she’d gotten a level for decoding a single word? Perhaps it was that she’d actively settled on a translation rather than let the system do all the work?

“I see you’ve picked up a couple strays.” The guard’s eyes flicked to Cass and Salos, her attention bringing Cass back to the present. “An unusual pair of strays.”

What did she look like in this stranger’s eyes? What did Identify call her? Slyphid Warrior? Slyphid Mage? Slyphid Wanderer?

Was it too much to hope it called her human despite what her stat screen called her? Probably.

“I found her on my way home,” Alyx said briskly. “She saved my life.”

“Oh?” The guard looked Cass over again, her eyes picking Cass apart with renewed interest.

“Yes,” Alyx said.

The guard waited another moment, waiting for more information.

Alyx didn’t give it.

The guard sighed. “Fine. Where’d she come from?”

“Beyond the Open Sea.”

The guard glared. “That isn’t funny.”

“She’s my guest. Does it matter where she’s from?” There was a challenge in Alyx’s voice. A dare she wanted the guard to call her on.

The guard’s glare did not lessen as she turned the challenge over. Several seconds passed before she clicked her tongue and tossed the papers back at Telis. “Fine. This is all in order. It’s your problem if she’s got ties to Stross.”

Telis caught them far more gracefully than they were thrown.

“Sure, sure.” Alyx waved the guard off as they walked through the gate and into Velillia.

Velillia was a riot of color. Like Hervet, the streets were cobblestone, but where Hervet’s streets had been made from simple grey and brown stone, Velillia’s were intermixed with glass-like cobbles in colors as varied as red to green to purple. Some shimmered with swirls of other colors where the sun hit them.

Like Hervet, the buildings were all multiple floors, with the upper floors hanging out over the street. But here, nearly every building stretched up three or five stories instead of Hervet’s humble two. And every building was painted in colorful patterns.

Cloth streamers hung between opposing balconies, each one a new vibrant color. Most had strings of glass beads hanging in tassels, jingling in the wind. Where the sun poked through the buildings, a kaleidoscope of color was projected onto the street below.

At the street level, every building was a shop front. Colorful, semi-translucent windows decorated every shop. Vendors’ doors hung open and they or their greeters shouted to the passersby for attention, advertising their wears or disparaging their competitors’.

When they were well out of earshot of the guard post, Alyx started cursing quietly under her breath.

“Something wrong?” Cass asked. She glanced over her shoulder, but nothing seemed to have changed. None of the guard so much as looked their way.

“The festival was delayed,” Alyx muttered.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” They weren’t late now. Which meant Alyx was starting on the same playing field as everyone else.

“Yeah, mostly. But, it means that my family will still be in town. I was expecting most of them to be out already. The city is a lot more dangerous than I had planned.

"Worse, they’re probably bored waiting around for this all to start.

“Telis, see what supplies are still available.”

“Shall I meet you at the townhouse or the manor?” Telis asked.

Alyx pursed her lips. “Manor. It would look like I was hiding if I stayed at the townhouse right now.”

“You would be hiding,” Marco pointed out.

Telis shot him a glare and he shut up. She continued, “I assume you would like to skip the mercenaries this time?”

Alyx hesitated. “A guide would be useful, but I’d suspect any guides that you could still hire.”

“Agreed.”

“I should be enough,” Marco said. “It’s been a while, but I followed your mother down there. People call it a maze, but if the only goal is the Blessing, you just keep goin’ straight.”

“I dislike the idea of the two of you going alone,” Telis said.

“What other option do I have?” Alyx asked.

“I can come,” Cass interjected. Her help wouldn’t be a lot, but it had to be better than Alyx taking on the trials of this festival thing alone.

I am sure we have better things to be doing, Salos muttered.

Alyx shook her head. “I can’t ask you to come.”

“Why not?” Cass asked. She needs to win this thing to find some information for us, Cass reminded him. Why shouldn’t we help?

“I can’t possibly compensate you for helping me with this,” Alyx said. “You should stay in town with Telis. Marco and I have done worse.”

We have other avenues to explore here, Salos added. And I am surprised you seem so eager to jump back into a dangerous situation.

“I don’t need compensation.” Cass restrained a sigh. “You’re doing this for me, right? I should help.”

Alyx shook her head.

Telis coughed. “I think this can be decided once we have a better feel for the situation. Delaying the opening of the Catacombs is highly unusual. Decisions can be made once the specific cause and the related effects have been ascertained, yes?”

Alyx didn’t look pleased to be dropping the conversation, but she nodded. “Yeah. That’s reasonable. See what you can find out, Telis.”

The butler nodded. “I shall be back shortly.”

And the woman vanished, horse included.

Cass blinked. There had been no fanfare, no flashing lights, no feeling of space shifting or perception sliding. The butler had been there one moment, the next the town’s crowd was pressing into the now-empty space.

Alyx chuckled. “She’s good at that, huh?”

“How does she do that?” Cass asked.

Alyx shook her head. “It’s generally considered rude to ask. I believe it’s a skill though. Even I don’t know if it’s a manipulation of space or perception or something else. What I do know is that she knows how to be exactly where she’s needed and she takes uncommon pride in doing so.

“Come on, let’s get to the manor. She’ll probably beat us there, even with her separate tasks.”